How Easter Island’s stone faces would go with the flow

Statues on Easter Island had long confounded researchers as there was no pattern to their locationRACHEL KRAMER/GETTY IMAGES

By the coast of Easter Island the stone figures of ancestors stand in rows, gazing inland.

What are they thinking? What are they guarding? Archaeologists believe they now know the answer: they mark the rare sites of fresh water.

Easter Island in the Pacific is famous for its stone torsos, known as moai, which the indigenous Rapa Nui people believe embody their ancestors. Almost 1,000 dot the island, carved out of rock taken from a quarry in the centre. Some have been transported miles to platforms, called ahu, on the coast.

Many of the statues, made from rock quarried in the centre, had been moved miles to the shoreGETTY IMAGES

The choice of sites seemed oddly eclectic. “Look at a map, and you see the ahu are not in the places you would commonly think you would put a monument,” Carl Lipo, from Binghamton…

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